"I think I will take a little nap after all," he said, and fell over backward, spilling wine across his lap.
Marcie and the giant wrestler waited over him as he snored. She put her ear to his chest, and clearly heard his steady pulse. She looked up at the wrestler with pleading eyes. Without having been asked, he put a pillow over the emperor's face to prevent him from calling out and with his other hand he wrapped a leather strap around the Concerned One's throat and strangled him by slowly twisting the strap tighter. In this sordid way did Luke Anthony, the Concerned One, the last of his line, die: insane, his skin corrupt with open sores, his dreams haunted by ghostly wolves, and his last two friends in the world his executioners. What a great disappointment it must have been to his immortal soul to realize his body was mortal after all! What a greater shock it must have been to him when he discovered his soul was not going to heaven to dwell in the company of Mathias the Glistening and the other gods!
Not knowing what they should do next, Marcie sent for General Lamb, and the commander of the City Guardsmen ordered the body buried beneath the floor of the school; then he sent out the happy news of the emperor's death to every aristocratic home in the city.
At dawn on New Year's Day, everyone was aware the Concerned One was gone. Senator Coppola, one of the men the emperor had supposedly been going to murder, asked and got a resolution from his fellow senators that Luke Anthony's body be exhumed and dragged on a hook through the capital's streets. Not only was this done, the people took turns attacking the corpse with hammers and knives as the City Guardsmen brought it past their doorsteps. He had been their champion while he lived; now that he was gone, the people wanted to be on the winning side far more than they desired to honor their former friend. The city's great men, on the other hand, had gone to bed quaking at the thought of what the emperor might do to them; they awoke unafraid of anything, now that the creature was dead. They gathered on the tall steps at the front of the Senate to pro claim their reborn joy to the equally brave crowds. Never had the air above the floating city of the Aztecs been so bruised with fine words as it was on that New Year's Day. Orator after wellborn orator came forward to hurl insults at the dead man. They made jokes relating to his gilded hair and beard, and mocked his physical condition. "He was more savage than Cepheus," the speakers said, "more perverse than Darko. As he did to his countless victims, let it be done to him and to his supporters." The Senate called for the immediate deaths of the late emperor's secret agents, and the City Guardsmen did as they demanded. As many of these agents were unknown, the Guardsmen necessarily had to kill many they only suspected of having been agents in order to get at those who were guilty. On that day of freedom, no one objected to their crude methods.
Patrick Herman Pretext, he of the distinguished profile and the owner of the longest and most silvery of patrician manes, paid the City Guardsmen twelve thousand dollars apiece, and they, out of a new sense of public obligation, made him the new emperor. He put on the purple robes and sent the men and women of Garden City back to their appointed tasks, though in Father's case, that meant he was sent to a new assignment. Pretext began a program of administrative reform designed to return the government to fiscal stability and to reestablish imperial control in the provinces. He freed those Luke Anthony had sent into exile and pardoned those sentenced to death. Everyone who was anyone gave him high marks for his magnanimous behavior on the throne, for his dignified mien at public ceremonies, and for the generous reception he gave to every petitioner. He ruled for three months before General Lamb and the City Guardsmen stabbed him to death while he slept.
Father and those of us in his household meanwhile sailed to the big island of Hawaii and to the Empire's last operative hydrogen gun on the slope of Mauna Kea. In that isolated spot, the metal plague had not yet reached and we could be launched into orbit. The technicians put us asleep, because we would not be able to stand the g-forces while awake; then we were placed into a container that rides suspended above an electromagnetic track for twenty-three miles up the mountain's long slope, gradually accelerating to liftoff speed, when the detachable hydrogen engines turn on and blast us above the Earth's atmosphere. We joined an ore barge in orbit, and rode it to our destination on Mars, where the metal plague had appeared, but would not destroy the mining colony for many months to come.
As was told at the story's beginning, the fool John Chrysalis back in Garden City would give twenty-five thousand dollars apiece to the Guardsmen to become emperor after Pretext was dead. That pretender reigned for the sixty-six days Abdul Selin needed to march from the Missouri; on the sixty-seventh day, the First of June, Selin ordered this wouldbe ruler hunted down inside the palace and disposed of, but one of Chrysalis's last guards performed this task for Selin before the Turk's men could reach the palace. Within four years of Selin's rise to absolute power in North America, every person named on the fraudulent lists of the Concerned One's victims would suffer the same fate as had befallen John Chrysalis. Even the cunning General Lamb, the giant Norman, Marcie the concubine, and Einman the chamberlain would go in front of a firing squad. There they would learn Selin and his vast family of criminals were not going to share what little was left of the Pan-Polarian Empire with anyone.
hirty years have fled the Earth since Father defeated Selin in the pass between Nicea and Eribulus, and the past has long since blended into the present.
Selin returned to Garden City after his loss and patched together another, much smaller army. Within a year he had learned his other rival, Whiteman in Britain, had withered away after he was no longer able to pay his soldiers. Selin was thereafter left free to establish a new dictatorship in what was left of the Empire in North America. The ruling principle of his reign would be "Give everything to the army, and give the army to me and my family of criminals. Let the rest go to hell." He executed most of the prominent men remaining in the city for the sake of their property-property he needed to finance the army and their never ending wars on North America's frontiers. Luke Anthony had been a careless madman, but Selin was as methodical as he was ruthless. While his insane predecessor had killed thousands as a sport, Selin killed hundreds of thousands out of what he construed to be necessity. He slew any who might stand against him and those he thought might someday be able to. No one in Garden City I have named in this account-save for the members of our household who were there but temporarily-would live to see the end of his eighteen-year rule. Selin raised up a new generation of leading citizens to become governors and legislators in the place of those he had killed. Before he departed this world for the land from which none return, Selin had already sent most of these younger men before him as scouts. Many of his administrators and officers naturally came from his enormous Turkish clan. Selin reasoned he could trust no one else in that troubled era. He did not trust them overmuch, and he retained the emperor's prerogative to kill any family members he thought too ambitious. Given the inclinations of his family, Selin would find many of his relatives too ambitious or otherwise defective, and he would have no choice but to eliminate them.
The sly Mr. Golden and the other market speculators survived as long as they were useful to the new emperor's ends. In time Selin would decide he needed their money more than he needed their fealty. Two years after Selin's ascension, a detachment of soldiers came to call upon Mr. Golden at his stately home high above the city. The fat, vulgar man had seen the armed men tramping up the pathway and went running with his family out the back door while his servants stalled the soldiers at the front of the estate. He did not realize the troopers had taken the precaution of surrounding the estate before they approached. They overtook Mr. Golden and his equally plump family in the sunny fields behind his house with its whitewashed walls and red tile roof. By evening Selin's men were strolling back down the hill, Mr. Golden's money in hand. The bodies of the fuel factor and his household were left hanging upside down from the arched gate in the front of their beautiful home.
Although by this t
ime in history there was little in the way of tech nology that could be lost that was not already gone, the common people never favored Selin as they had the Concerned One, despite the fact that the latter man had presided over the loss of electricity and most of the Empire. The little Turk raised taxes, reduced the dole, devalued the currency in order to decrease the government's debt, cut back the athletic shows, and he was never slow to send in the army if the people ever rioted. Their disapproval of him gained the people nothing. The only power left belonged to the army and its leader. Those outside the army could weep salt tears to ease their troubles, and their tears no longer mattered to any but themselves.
For himself, Selin chose a quiet family life and hid his person within the safety of his very well-paid forces. He had no bad habits, not counting murder, and took no chances with his safety. He died of natural causes while campaigning against an uprising in that part of North America that once was called Texas.
During his time on the throne Selin would make war on rebels in Central America and proposed a new campaign on our traditional enemy, the Chinese, which was wishful thinking in an age when the Empire no longer had a navy; so he instead destroyed a hundred cities within Mexico and the American southwest for having supported either Father or Whiteman, and sent his army against any cults he suspected had a poor opinion of his own beloved sun religion. In the countryside around Garden City he put to death thousands of the indigenous farmers, as he thought the members of his clan should own their land. Two years into his rule, he declared the late Luke Anthony a god equal to the emperors before him. Taking into account every bad thing he did, I have to say Selin's greatest crime came at the end of his life, for on his deathbed he named his son his successor in power.
To be perfectly correct, I should say Selin named both his son Brass and Brass's little brother Gunter to succeed him, which is to say he nominated a lamb to serve with a wolf. The oldest son, known as the Hooded One for the manner of dress he made popular among his upper-class disciples, had his younger brother strangled within a year of their father's demise. For good measure and to impress upon everyone that he was answerable only to the army, the Hooded One murdered the other twenty thousand surviving members of the Selin clan his father had led. The Hooded One would have been a rare creature in any age; in his person were combined a madness worthy of Luke Anthony and the martial severity of his father. His six years as commander of the shrinking Empire were an extravaganza of public executions and private debauchery that will be the envy of tyrants for ages to come. To pay for his government he further devalued the currency and extended citizenship to every free inhabitant of the Empire. (Citizenship no longer brought an individual any political rights, since no one outside the army had any, but it did make everyone who owned it responsible for paying taxes.) The Hooded One's insane energy would, in time, make even the army weary, and Marcus Dross, a soldier of humble origins the Hooded One had set over the City Guardsmen, assassinated him and declared himself emperor. The army killed Mr. Dross after a few months of misrule and replaced him with a weird boy they found in a temple of the sun god, a boy who may or may not have been the Hooded One's natural son, but definitely was a devotee of the same cult the Selin clan had favored. The perverted child called himself Helios after the name the sun god is given in southern California, the spot in which the army had found him. Though the effeminate boy killed the wealthy and the poor as ably as any ruler who had served before him, Helios offended noble taste by dressing as a prostitute and practicing certain disgusting acts on the high steps in front of the palace. As much as his antics entertained the soldiers, their officers came to feel it was not proper, given the high standards the previous emperors had set, to have a sissy as their leader. After four years that he spent inside the palace grounds engaged in one continuous party, the army killed the odd boy and put on the throne the Hooded One's cousin, Alexander Selin, the last of the once vast family. He had reigned for only two years when the people native to the capital and to Mexico itself sacked the city and renamed it Mexico City. Over the past decades, there have been several pretenders in North America who have momentarily held a portion of what was once the Pan-Polarian Empire; none of them ruled for long or were able to expand into the separate nations and city-states the Empire has become. We in Europe heard of these would-be emperors only many months after they had been overthrown.
After we reached Europe when our army crossed the Bosporus, Father, Medus, Helen, and I journeyed through the newly separated states that had been provinces of the Empire to Amsterdam in what was again called the Netherlands. We found the man Samuel in the port district the day we arrived in that crowded city. He gave us the fifty thousand dollars in gold Father had set aside with him, which was money Father had gotten from Mr. Golden back when the fuel factor was buying army contracts. To speak in plain language, the money had been a bribe. Knowing that has not prevented us from using the ill-gotten cash as we would. There are no longer any fortunes in the world that are not ill gotten to some degree, and the dirty money Samuel handed to us was at least cleansed a bit by a father's love.
Amsterdam was and remains the largest and richest city on that portion of the northern coast. Political power had long resided elsewhere; during the years of the Empire, Amsterdam had learned to be content with presiding over the Empire's business in the northwest portion of the European mainland. The city was and is the corridor between the rich agricultural lands of the European coastal plain and points west. Whatever entered the city's port now had to do so via sailing ships, and the cargo they brought was unloaded on the piers and carried by animal caravans to cities that once had been linked by hyperfast railways and instantaneous communications. The terrible diseases that had only recently destroyed much of the world's population had lost much of their original power, and though Amsterdam's sanitation system could have used much improvement, the time of epidemics had passed. There was plenty to eat in the city-unless one wanted tropical fruit and chocolate-and, best of all, the people in the city did not know who we or Father were.
In the same market we met Samuel we purchased a tiny coffee shop. We bought and sold from the small room facing the street in the front of a one-story building. The servants and Father and I lived in the larger rooms behind the shop, where we also had a small enclosed garden and could escape the dust and noise at the other end of our home. From the rear of our garden we could see the city's famous harbor, which is not a large boast, considering as how the entire city seems to sit surrounded by water. In our new city we have done business with traders from every nation in creation, from the men in furs from Greenland to the brown men in turbans from lands south of China. We do not thrive. We do make more money than we spend and live as we want in the heart of the human anthill that we have come to accept as our hometown.
The permanent residents of Amsterdam are approximately half native Dutch and half refugees who landed there when the Empire collapsed. Both groups have become book lovers now that they have no other entertainment, and in addition to the city's many famous libraries, which are well stocked even if they are nothing compared to the imperial library that once existed in North Dakota, there are on every street book dealers who rent out copies of the world's literature they print in simple back-room presses. By law, the city makes a duplicate of every new manuscript a ship brings into the port, and the private dealers will pay visitors for the opportunity to do the same. At the time I settled into our shop I thought I would pass the rest of my life reading these books, caring for my aging father, and conversing with the ever-flowing river of strangers frequenting our shop.
Two years into our new stationary life my plans were interrupted after I met Jon, a native of the city and one a couple years my senior. He had been a fisherman since he was a boy of eight on one of the local vessels and had risen over the years to the rank of ship's captain; when I made his acquaintance he told me he was interested in leaving the sea and starting his own business in the city now that he had some
money saved. Like many in the city, Jon was a Christian, a circumstance that made me leery of him, though-perhaps thanks to his religion-he had better manners than a sailor should have. After only a week of lingering about our shop and making inane conversation while he stole sidelong looks at me, he proposed he and I marry. I told him I was an old woman, nearly thirty, and marriage was out the question; I was content to run the coffee shop and read my books in the sunshine of our garden while Father snored away, dreaming of ancient battles. Jon insisted. Despite the futility of his petition, I admired him for not being easily discouraged. He believed Medus was my uncle, perhaps because he was dark like I am, and so Jon gave my father's batman a fat sack of gold and promised Helen-who Jon assumed was my aunt-he would treat me well. Father immediately liked Jon because the younger man listened to the old man's stories, even to the one about the Nile crocodile, and not once did Jon interrupt him. With all four of them teamed against me (and given his pleasing manners and looks) I gradually softened my position and allowed I might consent to be his wife, on the condition I have no children. I insisted upon that point even after we were wed and Jon quickly made me pregnant. I said to my husband after I had given birth to our first daughter that the great happiness I had found with him notwithstanding, this would be our only child. I told him the same after I had borne three more daughters and a son.
The Martian General's Daughter Page 25
